Anonymous trolls are as pathetic as the
anonymous "sources" that contaminate the gutless
journalism of the New York Times, BBC, and CNN.
Rather than call it cyber-journalism we should
stop drinking this digital poison

By Robert Fisk

January 12, 2013 "The
Independent"
-- Recognise this chap? He is a
“liar”, an “idiot”, a “terrorist sympathiser”,
“deceitful”, a “disgrace”, an “insane liberal
fool”, he is “on the payroll of the Muslim
Brotherhood” and “on the payroll of euro neo-nazis”.
He is “mad” (in Arabic as well as in English).
But wait. This poor bloke is also “an ignorant
Jew-hating worthless piece of shit” whose “hate
can be seen in his eyes”. “Pigpiss be upon him
in Hell”, is one of the curses directed at him.

He
tells “lie upon lie, all of them directly or
indirectly aimed at the destruction of
Israel”. And he has received the following
message: “The Islamist cut-throats you
sympathise with would gladly slash your
pencil neck from ear to ear just because you
won’t bow to their bloodthirsty pedophile
[sic] prophet.” And now a clue. In this same
list of website filth – sent over just two
days – an anonymous writer adds: “Could
Robert Fisk be next?”

Sick
people

My sin
– and the above, believe me, is the clean
end of the abuse – was to write an article
last week about the Middle East in 2013.
Now in the old days, when someone stuffed
something abusive in your letter box, you’d
be round the cop-shop in no time,
brandishing green-ink letters in the face of
the station sergeant. Threatening behaviour,
at the least. But now, merely to complain
about this sort of incendiary material marks
you as the oddball. “It’s because of your
profile,” a friend told me. So that’s what I
deserve? I’ve always said that if you report
the Middle East, you’ve got to take the
sticks and the stones. Sometimes literally.

But
something is going wrong here. Surely this
is not what the internet is for? Across the
world now, anonymity – the bane of every
newspaper Letters Editor – is accepted by
cyber-journalism, the more hateful, the more
understandable. I’ve pulled out of several
radio “chat” shows in mid-broadcast because
of the absolute refusal of the anchors to
explain why they will not challenge the
sometimes viciously named Tweeters or email
writers. Websites and blogs and chatrooms
were never intended to cover the Breivik-like
cruelties of these sick people.

Former US diplomat
Christopher Hill,
a man whose views normally make me cringe –
he was ambassador to Iraq, special envoy to
Kosovo and a Dayton negotiator – has
observed these dangers. “Instant access to
information does not mean instant access to
knowledge, much less wisdom,” he wrote
recently. “In the past, information was
integrated with experience. Today, it is
integrated with emotion... Digital
technology has played an important role “in
fostering this atmosphere of bad manners,
vicious personal attacks, intolerance,
disprespect... Bullying has gone virtual”.

Just
before Christmas, an
Irish minister of state, Shane McEntee,
committed suicide after receiving a swath of
online hate-mail. At his funeral, his
brother Gerry was applauded when he attacked
social media: “Shame on you people, you
faceless cowards who sent him horrible
messages on the website and on text, shame
on you.” Shane McEntee had been particularly
condemned for defending government cuts to
Ireland’s respite care programme and,
anyway, I’m not sure that anonymous emails
kill. Newspapers persecute people, too, but
at least editors have an address.

Ireland’s deputy prime minister has now
talked of new legislation against internet
abuse – a dodgy one, this, when ex-IRA
officials sit in Dáil Eireann and the abuse
can work both ways. The French government,
too, is considering new rules to prevent
racist, anti-semitic and homophobic remarks
on Twitter. Racist and anti-Jewish hashtags
were removed in France in October but
Twitter now claims that it cannot reveal
their real identities – in other words, the
culprits – since they were filed in
California; thus French laws do not apply.

So let
me go now to Irish journalist John Waters,
who last year complained about the
“disproportionate venom of online
commentary” and the way bloggers resort to
“pre-civilisational forms of communication”.
In a cyber-style parody, he wrote that he
would prefer that the creator of Twitter be
arrested and his company closed down. Then
he added – quite deliberately, in the
language and grammar of the repulsive
messages we all receive: “i wish they wud
burn the Twitter founder in oil and leave
his carcass out for the buzzards.”

Poison

And
what happened? A Twitter representative
called Waters’ newspaper employer – on a
landline – to complain that his last
sentence had “crossed a line”. What
particular line, I wonder? And when Waters –
a man I’m not often in agreement with –
later wanted to contact Twitter to remove a
defamatory posting, he discovered he could
only do so... by signing up to Twitter! No,
we are not Luddites, Waters said. But
something was needed “to curb the toxic and
lawless climate developing on the web”. Why
should puerile pseudonyms be allowed to
present themselves as participants in a
democratic debate?

I
agree. Chat rooms and comment sections of
online newspapers often claim to have a
“moderator” – a craven expression since it
suggests that the abused and the abuser are
equally guilty or innocent – who can remove
“inappropriate” material. This is a bit like
saying that Hitler could sometimes make
“inappropriate” remarks. Indeed, reading a
book over Christmas about the Nazi rise to
power in Germany, I found that many NSDAP
(Nazi party) threats in the thirties did
read like web insults.

So
what to do? Online comments are often
factually wrong, but anonymity allows
writers to use vulgar and abusive language
to support their lies. They often fail what
has been called “the quality test” –
rigorously applied, for example, when
newspaper editors refuse to publish letters
without a name and some form of address. We
are talking about verifiable comment.

Anonymity on the Net is as pathetic as the
anonymous “sources” that have contaminated
the gutless journalism of the
New York Times or
CNN or the
BBC for decades. And the innocent must
be able to seek redress in cyberspace as
well as in print. Poison-pen letters are
illegal. So are offensive electronic
messages, if the Malicious Communications
Act of 1988 is to be believed. So why should
we be forced to drink poison on the Net?

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